Re: What Multicast ICP?

Kenichi MATSUI writes:

| Does anybody use a multicast already? If so, please let us know how to
| use multicast or your experience, or show us the pointer(URLs).

OK, well I kind of wrote it... :-)

Personally I see this primarily as an experimental thing, which is
probably only going to be useful at the moment for people who have
native multicast routing deployed (or are running several caches on
the same bit of wire) and who want to cut down on the number of ICP
packets being bounced around. This matches the situation in ac.uk
quite nicely, so I'm hoping that we can get interest from enough
people with MBONE connectivity that we can do meaningful trials over a
wide area. The guys at Manchester Computing - <URL:http://
www.mcc.ac.uk/Cache/> also want to use this to cut down on inter-cache
traffic on their local Metropolitan Area Network. Perhaps we can get
some more guinea-pigs^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvolunteers ?

There are lots of other interesting possibilities. For instance:
multicast groups based on TTL/admin scoping with no trust relationship
between servers (truly auto-configuring). I'm also particularly
interested in seeing what happens when we introduce what I guess I'd
call "supply" caches - caches that don't (necessarily) take the full
brunt of service traffic, but instead stock up on particular objects -
like the resources catalogued by Yahoo et al. This isn't particularly
a multicast thing, but using multicast (maybe - depending on routing
hardware, topology, and pruning!) has the potential to make it more
friendly to the underlying network ?

If anyone's interested in mucking about with this stuff, there are a
few mailing lists chartered explicitly to discuss WWW <-> IP multicast
integration...

Cheerio,

Martin